There is an increasing amount of images appearing on the web; however, a large amount of images are small or low-quality images. Due to the backend index generation and serving capacity limitations, it is not feasible to maintain all the images in the index. In one current implementation, only images with dimensions larger than a predetermined number of pixels are indexed. Images with dimensions (e.g., width, height) smaller than the pixel count are classified as “junk” images and filtered out while building the index. Existing multimedia backend crawlers crawl and process millions of images per day, of which a lesser, but yet significant number of images are “junk” images. A dilemma is that the image dimensions can only be known after the image is downloaded. Thus, much of the crawler bandwidth is wasted to download and process the junk images, which are to be eventually discarded.